By investigating fossils, Prof. Kießling and Dr. Carl Reddin, who is also at GeoZentrum Nordbayern, have shown that coral, molluscs, and sponges have been following their preferred cold and warm zones for half a billion years. Isotherms (geographic lines denoting the same temperature, for example 20°C) shift towards the poles or the equator as soon as the global temperature rises or decreases. Isotherms have been shifting towards the poles for several years due to global warming.
The tendency towards climate-related migration is most apparent in tropical species. This may be due to the fact that several of these species live near the thermal maximum for complex organisms of 35-45°C . Current global warming trends are driving marine animals towards the poles, provided there is a suitable habitat they can migrate to.
The researchers claim adding historical data derived fudge factors to correct the discrepancy between climate models and historical observations, producing a Frankenmodel mix of fudge factors and defective physics, will make climate predictions more reliable (…)
by Fred Singer, May 15, 2018 in TheWallStreetJournal
It is generally thought that sea-level rise accelerates mainly by thermal expansion of sea water, the so-called steric component. But by studying a very short time interval, it is possible to sidestep most of the complications, like “isostatic adjustment” of the shoreline (as continents rise after the overlying ice has melted) and “subsidence” of the shoreline (as ground water and minerals are extracted).
I chose to assess the sea-level trend from 1915-45, when a genuine, independently confirmed warming of approximately 0.5 degree Celsius occurred. I note particularly that sea-level rise is not affected by the warming; it continues at the same rate, 1.8 millimeters a year, according to a 1990 review by Andrew S. Trupin and John Wahr. I therefore conclude—contrary to the general wisdom—that the temperature of sea water has no direct effect on sea-level rise. That means neither does the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.
NASA says the greening of the planet is due to increased CO2, these guys are arguing against that, saying increased forest growth “correlates strongly to the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index”. Riiiighht. They say that “Europe’s early turnaround and expansion of forest resources obviously can’t be attributed to the rapid rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide that began decades later”. By the same token, the U.N. didn’t exist until decades later, and they sure as hell haven’t had any impact on the greening of the Eastern United States as shown in their map below (…)
Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations finished with developing countries demanding more clarity from their richer counterparts on when a promised package of $100 billion in aid will materialize.
Envoys from almost 200 nations are leaving Bonn, Germany, on Thursday without producing a draft negotiating text for ministers to discuss at the end of the year. Instead, they planned another round of negotiations in Bangkok before their annual conference in Poland in December.
The holdup threatens to unravel three years of work to complete the Paris Agreement, a landmark deal reached in 2015 that set out an ambition to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time (…)
During 2017, there were 150 graphs from 122 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals indicating modern temperatures are not unprecedented, unusual, or hockey-stick-shaped — nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability. We are a little over 4 months into the new publication year and already 81 graphs from 62 scientific papers undermine claims that modern era warming is climatically unusual.
by Tony Heller, May 12, 2012 in TheDeplorableClimSciBlog
Ninety-five degree temperatures were common in the Midwest during May prior to 1940, but almost never happen any more. May afternoon temperatures have been declining in the Midwest since the 19th century. The hottest May (by far) was 1934, when 100 degree temperatures were widespread across the Midwest, including 101 degrees at Algona, Iowa on May 7th, 1934.
Why do U.S. climate forecasters pay so much attention to a pattern that operates in the remote tropical Pacific? Because the Pacific is the world’s biggest ocean, and disruptions to its climate have a long reach. The seesawing changes in tropical rainfall, winds, and ocean temperature that accompany La Niña and its warm-phase partner, El Niño, trigger a cascade of potentially predictable impacts on seasonal climate in the United States and beyond.
Years ago, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. explained why sea surface temperatures (SST) were the best indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.
More recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
The report (.pdf, 11 pages), by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels, have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder” — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.
As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:
“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”
by Tony Heller, May 2, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimateScience
Measured US temperatures show cooling over the last 90 years. This doesn’t suit the needs of the climate mafia, so NOAA massively alters the data to turn cooling into warming. NOAA cools the past by more than one degree, and warms the present by nearly one degree. Then other climate scientists use this fake data to confirm fake theories about CO2 emissions warming the planet.
A new study by climatologists Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry concludes that Earth’s “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) to more atmospheric carbon dioxide is as much as 50% lower than climate alarmists have been claiming. That their paper was published in the Journal of Climate suggests that the asserted “97% consensus” of climate experts may be eroding.
Or as Cornwall Alliance founder Cal Beisner puts it (paraphrasing Winston Churchill) it may not be the beginning of the end of climate alarmism. But it could be the end of the beginning of alarmism as the dominant, ever-victorious tenet of our times.
Indeed, say other noted climatologists, there are good reasons to think ECS and alarmist errors are even greater than 50 percent. For one thing, there is no persuasive reason to assume our planet’s climate system (…)
by P. Homewood, May 2, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
For several decades now, Antarctica has not been cooperating with the “global” warming narrative, as the continent as a whole has not been warming.
Several scientific papers have been published recently that document the lack of an anthropogenic warming signal for the Antarctic continent or the surrounding ocean, as well as the dominance of natural variability (…)
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for April, 2018 was +0.21 deg. C, down a little from the March value of +0.24 deg. C
Global area-averaged lower tropospheric temperature anomalies (departures from 30-year calendar monthly means, 1981-2010). The 13-month centered average is meant to give an indication of the lower frequency variations in the data; the choice of 13 months is somewhat arbitrary… an odd number of months allows centered plotting on months with no time lag between the two plotted time series. The inclusion of two of the same calendar months on the ends of the 13 month averaging period causes no issues with interpretation because the seasonal temperature cycle has been removed, and so has the distinction between calendar months.
by M. Bastach, April 30, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Roughly 20 years ago, climate scientist Michael Mann published his famous “hockey stick” graph that he says “galvanized climate action” by showing unprecedented global warming.
Mann used the 20-year anniversary of the graph to opine on the “industry-funded” attacks “to discredit the iconic symbol of the human impact on our climate,” which Mann claimed had withstood criticism.
“Yet, in the 20 years since the original hockey stick publication, independent studies, again and again, have overwhelmingly reaffirmed our findings, including the key conclusion: recent warming is unprecedented over at least the past millennium,” Mann wrote in Scientific American on April 20.
However, the two Canadian researchers who found serious flaws in the “hockey stick” study’s data and methodology disputed Mann’s characterization of the graph’s legacy.
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have put together the first global carbon dioxide maps based on data from the Chinese satellite TanSat. The satellite also measures what lead researcher Yang Dongxu calls “carbon dioxide flux,” changes in its behavior on Earth and in the Earth’s atmosphere.
As the current solar cycle nears an end, it will go down as the weakest in close to 200 years. And as inhabitants of the northern hemisphere dig themselves out of an especially icy and snowy winter and Arctic sea ice rebounds, it may all be in part linked to low solar activity as many scientific studies have long suggested.
Figure 1: The current solar cycle no. 24 (red) compared to the mean of the previous 23 recorded solar cycles (blue) and the similar solar cycle no. 5 (black)
IBRA, Oman — In the arid vastness of this corner of the Arabian Peninsula, out where goats and the occasional camel roam, rocks form the backdrop practically every way you look.
But the stark outcrops and craggy ridges are more than just scenery. Some of these rocks are hard at work, naturally reacting with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into stone.
Veins of white carbonate minerals run through slabs of dark rock like fat marbling a steak. Carbonate surrounds pebbles and cobbles, turning ordinary gravel into natural mosaics.
Even pooled spring water that has bubbled up through the rocks reacts with CO2 to produce an ice-like crust of carbonate that, if broken, re-forms within days.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
By taking a closer look, scientists find resilience in face of heat stress.
Coral reef bleaching is stark evidence of the damage being inflicted by global climate change on marine ecosystems, but a research team has found some cause for hope. While many corals are dying, others are showing resilience to increased sea surface temperatures, pointing to possible clues to the survival and recovery of these vitally important aquatic habitats (…)
Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim has warned that unless the Maldives gets its climate cash before 2020, the 1.5C global warming limit will be breached.
I’m not sure how the Maldives reconciles their climate concerns with all their fly-in tourism and their aggressive airport and resort building programmes, but no doubt some of that climate cash will help with the reconciliation if it ever arrives.
It is a well-known feature of climate change that since 1850 multiple climate datasets present a ~ 60-year oscillation. I recently wrote about it in the 7th chapter of my Nature Unbound series. This oscillation is present in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), Arctic Oscillation (AO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Length of Day (LOD), and Global (GST) and Northern Hemisphere (NHT) temperatures, with different lags.
To me this oscillation is not a cycle because prior to 1850 it had a more variable period and it is not well identified in LIA records. Since the origin of this oscillation is unknown, models have a hard time reproducing it and it is all but ignored by the IPCC. It is a big oscillation with an amplitude of ± 0.3 °C in NHT (0.1-0.2°C in GST; figure 2). While the long-term temperature trend is unaffected by it, there is a large effect on the 30-year trends. If this oscillation is considered, most of the climate alarmism vaporizes.
As readers here are aware, I don’t usually critique published climate papers unless they are especially important to the climate debate. Too many papers are either not that important, or not that convincing to me.
The holy grail of the climate debate is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS): just how much warming (and thus associated climate change) will occur in response to an eventual doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?
Beijing has undergone several important urbanization development stages since late 1978. Linked with urbanization, the so-called “urban heat island effect” is a key problem caused by urban land expansion. Such changes in air temperature in Beijing inevitably have an impact on the daily lives of its inhabitants, and is therefore of considerable interest to scientists and the wider public alike.
Dr. Xiaojuan LIU and Associate Professor Guangjin TIAN from the School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, used the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with a single urban canopy model and high-resolution land cover data to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of summertime urban warming influenced by three stages of urban land expansion during 1990-2010 across Beijing. They found that urban-induced warming increased with urban land expansion, but the speed of warming declined slightly during 2000-10.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
